Contemporary Lithic Analysis in the Southeast

Representing work by a mixture of veterans and a new generation of lithic analysts, Contemporary Lithic Analysis in the Southeast explores fresh ideas while reworking and pushing the limits of traditional methods and hypotheses.

The variability in the southeastern lithic landscape over space and through time makes it a dynamic and challenging region for archaeologists. Demonstrating a holistic approach and using a variety of methods, this volume aims to derive information regarding prehistoric lifeways from lithic assemblages.

The contributors use data from a wide temporal span and a variety of sites across the Southeast, ranging from Texas to South Carolina and from Florida to Kentucky. Not merely cautionary tales, these case studies demonstrate the necessity of looking beyond the bag of lithic material sitting in the laboratory to address the key questions in the organization of prehistoric lithic technologies. How do field-collection strategies bias our interpretations? What is therelationship between technological strategies and tool design? How can inferences regarding social and economic strategies be made from lithic assemblages?

Contents

List of Illustrations

1. Lithic Studies in the Southeast: Retrospective and Future Potential

The southeastern
United States, referred to in this volume as the Southeast,
has a rich and varied natural landscape. The people who occupied this region
for over 10,000 years before European contact were just as culturally rich and
variable. One aspect of prehistoric research, often
undervalued in the Southeast,
is the study of lithic assemblages. More specifically, holistic integrated ...

3. Beyond Stages: Modeling Clovis Biface Production at the Topper Site, South Carolina

In the late eighteenth century, William Henry Holmes (1894) introduced the
concept of “stages of production” in the manufacture of stone tools. While the
theoretical landscape has changed drastically in the past century, lithic analysts
have continued to use this methodological construct (Bleed 2001, 2002),
particularly in the southeastern United States (Carr and Bradbury 2000:125–126)....

4. A Comparison of Clovis Blade Technologies at the Topper and Big Pine Tree Sites, Allendale County, South Carolina

Prehistoric people made design choices in the manufacture of stone tools in response
to social and economic strategies employed, as well as the raw material
environment in which they operated. Some, including
Clovis people, manufactured
a distinctive flake type, blades, for use in a variety of tasks or for modification
into specialized tool forms. The variable occurrence of blades in the archaeological...

5. Distinguishing Taphonomic Processes from Stone Tool Use at the Gault Site, Texas

Artifact context is particularly important when conducting lithic microwear
research. An assessment of artifact context must include consideration of what
happens to an artifact after it enters the archaeological
record (Schiffer 1996;
Schnurrenberger
and Bryan 1985). Taphonomic processes alter this record
and complicate interpretations of artifact and site function (Levi-S
ala 1986).
Whether these processes occurred at the time the artifact was discarded, while...

Nearly 20 years of debate and discussion have taken place concerning the use of
an organization
of lithic technology approach for making inferences of past human
behavior (e.g., Kelly 1994; Simek 1994; Torrence 1994). Importantly, significant
efforts have been made to apply and expand this approach (e.g., Andrefsky
2008a; Bradbury et al. 2008; Carr 2008; Carr and Bradbury 2001; Cobb
2000; Odell 2003; Shott and Nelson 2008). We present our current conception...

Constructing hypotheses about past cultures based on flaked stone assemblages
is a complex undertaking, requiring the collection of large data sets of
observations and appropriate middle range theory linking organized patterns
of attributes to human behaviors. Often the sample sizes are small, the assemblage
or site representativeness open to question, and/or the linking arguments
are weak. Nevertheless, the interpretation and integration of lines of evidence...

8. Low-Quality Quartz and Implications for Technological Inferences

Coarse-grained
lithic raw materials are thought to present a myriad of problems
for prehistoric knappers, and undoubtedly they present a different set of
problems for lithic analysts.
One such raw material, quartz, abundant throughout
the Southeast and used for thousands of years, was the primary material
for the manufacture of stone tools at some sites. Modern analysts
faced with
a lithic assemblage dominated by quartz must overcome multiple issues that ...

After four excavation seasons at Eagle Drink Bluff Shelter, a small sandstone
rockshelter in the highlands of the Upper Cumberland Plateau (UCP) of Tennessee,
components ranging from the Middle Archaic through the Late Woodland
have been identified. Here we present the results of technological and use-wear
analyses of the Late Archaic lithic assemblage, which contained more
than 180 finished and reworked stone tools. In general, rockshelters have been...

10. Shifting Strategies in Chert Use from the Late Archaic to the Early Fort Ancient at Elk Fork in Eastern Kentucky

Raw material studies have been a key component of lithic analysis
in the Southeast
for decades, mainly because of the mosaic of geologic formations with recognizable
varieties of useable stone and the fact that broad gaps between these
resources required logistical planning by prehistoric groups. While lithic analysts
have long recognized the potential of these signature lithic types for...

11. Lithic Reduction at a Middle Woodland Site in Mississippi: Scale, Classification, and Explanation

Woodland period research tends to focus on ceramic artifacts, likely due to
their usefulness in chronology construction. While lithic tools, such as projectile
points, have proven to be chronologically sensitive as well, within the
Woodland period as well as in other periods in northeast Mississippi (Burris
2006; Edmonds 2009; Rafferty 1994), reliance only on artifacts useful for
chronology construction masks the variability within the period in question. ...

12. Raising the Bar: Lithic Analysis and Archaeological Research in the Southeast

When I was asked to provide comments on the collection of lithic analysis
papers
presented at the Southeastern
Archaeological Conference (included within
this volume), I did not realize the extent to which lithic tools and debitage
had
been overlooked in the region as a medium for interpreting past aboriginal
practices and behaviors. According to the session abstract, the goal of the lithic
symposium and this volume is to highlight contemporary methods and theory...

13. The Organization of Technology Approach in the Southeast: A Call to Arms or a Requiem?

Andrew Bradbury and Philip Carr, along with Sarah Price, have once again
(Carr and Bradbury 2000) issued a call to lithic analysts
in the American
Southeast
for more frequent employment of an “organization
of technology” approach
to the study of stone artifacts. A useful definition of this concept was provided
by Koldehoff (1987:154): “The way in which a culture or society designs its
tools and structures tool production, use, and maintenance, so that the tools...

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